It is true that innovation is every stakeholder’s responsibility; if you incentivize folks properly and enable the organization to respond in kind, it will be their passion. And with passionate people evangelizing and promoting new visions, the cultural impact can only become viral and result in enduring success.

It is then essential to consider how an organization must structure itself to become a lean-mean-Innovation-Machine.

Few organizations today have a formal structure for processing ideas – which we know can encompass many activities, tasks and deliverables. Doing so without breaking other existing, functional and purposeful workflows is the balancing act everyone is trying to achieve. Part of the problem is that much of this architecting is being done by the seat of the pants. What is needed is a framework in the form of a dedicated department.

Now no one is a fan of new resource expenditures, but in the innovation realm as in others, no money - no candy. It is unrealistic to envision extraordinary innovation results without changing anything – so an innovation department needs to exist to manage some aspects of this burgeoning practice.

I many ways, the management of innovation could be compared to the management of Marketing 45 years ago – there was little if no market research, media planning, pricing analysis, trade management, channel development, consumer promotion, package design, etc. The need for it just hadn’t evolved yet. Today, there is a multi-billion dollar industry serving this practice and internal armies of experts solely dedicated to this function.

But what Innovation needs isn’t a large team of dedicated experts sitting in a physical department – the pace of business is too fast and the availability to expertise too accessible to labor along with that model; what is needed is a larger, more responsive and more diverse team than that. What’s is ultimately needed is a mix between physical and virtual departments, where the resources necessary to help good ideas find their zone and get over the hump that is them holding-up are exact and immediate.

For this, the resource expenditure part  needs to support two service points:

1. A small internal team focused on

a) Hunting down precise expertise, knowledge, documentation and decisions
b) Insuring approved ideas get implemented as planned
c) Managing the relationship with a larger group of external collaborators

2. Incentives to attract and deliver diverse on-demand collaboration resources where pay-out is directly linked to value-generating performance; whether idea submission, collaboration, tasking and/or delivering the end product – the virtual and mostly external department.

The knowledge, capabilities and motivation are there – on demand. All one needs to do is open their Innovation efforts to the global community – someone out there has the interest, motivation, time and expertise to do what you need now – all you have to do is invite them in and give them a reason to deliver.